The canoes plowed through heavy seas, their diminutive masts and flickering paddles barely visible above the waterline, as their occupants, drenched and exhausted, hoped to raise the little island of Navassa, about eight leagues distant. Even with the benefit of the most determined paddling, these canoes could make no more than ten leagues against the current in a twenty-four-hour period.
The unending exertion put the paddlers at risk of dehydration, a common affliction in the Caribbean, even on the water. One Indian died on the second night, as others, prostrate with exhaustion, lay on the bottoms of the canoes, and still others tried to paddle but strained to move their arms. With one feeble stroke after another they made their way, dabbing salt water on their parched tongues. By the time night fell for the second time, they still had not reached land.
At moonrise, Ferdinand learned from Méndez’s letter, they raised the white cliffs of Navassa, all two square miles of it, shimmering above the frosted wave tops. The whiteness came from the exposed coral and limestone poking out beyond the uninhabited island’s grass cover. They were still one hundred miles south of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Nevertheless, Méndez “joyfully” pointed out Navassa, and carefully doled out water to the paddlers. By dawn they had reached the island.
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hat they found was “bare rock, half a league around.” No Indians greeted them with water, food, or counsel. After they hurriedly offered thanks to the Lord for their survival, they realized that Navassa was nearly treeless and, worse, appeared to lack the drinking water they needed so desperately. In search of streams, they clambered and crawled from one steep cliff to another, collecting trickles of precious water in gourds. Eventually they found enough to fill their stomachs despite warnings not to drink too much. Nevertheless, some of the Indians drank without restraint, and grew violently sick, or died.
The rest of the day passed in relative tranquillity, the men playing and “eating shellfish that they found on the shore and cooked, for Méndez had brought flint and steel for making fire.” But they could not tarry; foul weather could arrive at any time. That evening they pushed off for Cape San Miguel, the nearest point on Hispaniola, traveling throughout the night to arrive by dawn, the fourth day after leaving Jamaica. They arrived exhausted once again, and spent two days recuperating before facing the challenges ahead.
Fieschi wished to return to Columbus, as arranged, to report their safe arrival on Hispaniola, but his traveling companions, both Europeans and Indians, were “exhausted and ill from their labors and from drinking sea water,” and refused to accompany him, “for the Christians regarded themselves as having been delivered from the whale’s belly, their three days and nights corresponding to those of the prophet Jonah.”
But Méndez had a different idea. Despite suffering from “quartan ague,” an archaic term for malaria, he led his men inland “over wretched paths and rugged mountains” to the western province of Xaraguá, formerly the refuge of Roldán and his rebels, where Nicolás de Ovando busied himself putting down another Indian rebellion. The cold-blooded governor feigned delight when these emissaries from Columbus appeared from nowhere, and in keeping with his anti-Columbian agenda, delayed giving the exhausted travelers permission to trek the seventy leagues to Santo Domingo.
During the seven months they were detained at Xaraguá, Méndez witnessed the governor’s cruelty. “He burned or hanged eighty-four ruling caciques,” including Anacaona, “the greatest chieftain of the island, who is obeyed and served by all the others.” She was also known as a composer of
areítos
, or narrative poems, and had been considered friendly to the Spaniards. At a feast in her honor organized by eight caciques, to which Ovando was invited, he set fire to the meetinghouse, arrested her and other Indian leaders, and executed all of them. Most were shot; Anacaona died by hanging. She was thirty-nine years old. Her husband, Caonabó, had been captured by Alonso de Ojeda, and died at sea en route to Spain. Even the Spaniards were appalled by Ovando’s brutality toward friendly Indians, but there was little they could do about it.
When the governor finally considered the pacification of Xaraguá complete, the indefatigable Méndez got permission to go on foot to the capital, all but forbidden to the Admiral himself. There he drew on Columbus’s “funds and resources” to buy and equip a caravel. “None had come for more than a year,” Méndez recalled, “but thanks be to God three arrived during my stay, one of which I bought and loaded with provisions: bread, wine, meat, hogs, sheep, fruit,” all now available, for a price, in this remote outpost of the Spanish empire.
He supervised provisioning the caravel for the voyage, and dispatched her to Jamaica in late May 1504, so that the Admiral “and all his men might come in it to Santo Domingo and from there return to Castile.” Méndez went ahead with two ships “to give the King and Queen an account of all that had happened on that voyage.” There would be much to tell.
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t about this time, in Spain, Queen Isabella fell seriously ill at Medina del Campo, a city known for its trade fairs, a little more than twenty miles from Valladolid. “The doctors have lost all hope for her health,” wrote Peter Martyr in despair. “The illness spread throughout her veins and slowly the dropsy became apparent. A fever never abandoned her, penetrating her to the core. Day and night she had an insatiable thirst, while the sight of food gave her nausea. The mortal tumor grew fast between her skin and flesh.”
As her strength ebbed and her thoughts turned to eternity, she cut back drastically on official business coming before her.
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s for Columbus and “all his companions,” having spent an entire year marooned in a lush, obscure, and troubled paradise on Jamaica, they “were highly delighted with the ship’s arrival.” When Méndez and Columbus later renewed their friendship in Spain and recalled the rescue, “His Lordship told me that in all his life he had never known so joyful a day, since he never expected to leave Jamaica alive.”
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or the moment, Columbus still had to neutralize the mutineers led by the Porras brothers, who had little appreciation for Méndez’s heroics. To bring them around, he dispatched two representatives—Ferdinand described them only as “respected persons”—considered friendly to both parties; they came bearing a gift in the form of the mouthwatering salt pork that Ovando had sent to Columbus. Captain Porras warily conferred with the two envoys by himself, fearing that they “brought an offer of a general pardon that his men might be persuaded to accept.” Nothing, not even Porras, could keep them from learning about the arrival of the caravel and its promise of a safe return to Spain, and, eventually, of Columbus’s offer of clemency.
The mutineers made a counteroffer: if given another ship all their own, they would leave. Failing that, they might consider leaving if they were guaranteed half the space on the little caravel Ovando had sent. And they wanted access to Columbus’s stores, because they had lost all of theirs. Becoming impatient, Columbus’s envoys explained why these demands were “unreasonable and unacceptable,” whereupon Porras’s men declared that if they were not willingly given what they wanted, they would seize it. With that, they turned their backs on the envoys, and the promise of a peaceful resolution. They went back to their followers, decrying Columbus as a “cruel and vengeful man,” and they told the others not to be afraid, they had friends at court who would rally to their side against the Admiral. (Ferdinand Columbus reflected on Roldán’s recent rebellion: “And see how well their enterprise turned out; assuredly it would be the same with them”—that is, with Porras’s followers.)
Porras devised an argument to defeat the powerful presence of the caravel and Méndez’s return. Do not believe your eyes, he told them. The ship was not real. It was merely, as Ferdinand recalled, a “phantasm conjured up by the magic arts of which the Admiral was a master,” an image evoking Columbus’s striking fear into the Indians by appearing to conjure a menacing lunar eclipse. “Clearly, a real caravel would not have left so soon, with so little dealing between its crew and the Admiral’s men.” If it had been real, “the Admiral and his brother would have sailed away in it.”
Columbus’s behavior these past eleven months invited this kind of wild speculation. Confined to his cabin, grumbling orders, leading the Indians to believe that he controlled the heavens, he acquired the aura of a man possessed if not by supernatural skills then by the gifts of prophecy and revelation. Spain had come to regard him as the discoverer of new lands, but he believed himself an instrument of divine revelation. Others had come to accept that Columbus was making history, but he wanted to see his deeds emblazoned in Holy Scripture, glittering with fire, and, if need be, soaked in blood. Other explorers, especially those seeking to usurp him, wrote on water, while his accomplishments would stand as monuments, or so he believed. He created history as he went, as if time and place were two aspects of the same entity that he had chased for twelve years, guided by Marco Polo, inspired by the Bible, and driven by his lust for gold.
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f not wholly convincing, Porras’s crude deception caused the mutineers to doubt what they could plainly see. So he strengthened the mutineers’ resolve, and prepared them to lay siege to all the ships, confiscate their contents, and even take the Admiral prisoner. Emboldened, they occupied an Indian village called Maima, close to the beached ships, to prepare an assault. As he had in similar situations, Columbus dispatched his brother Bartholomew “to bring them to their senses with soft words,” reinforced by fifty armed loyalists in waiting to repel an attack, if it materialized. On May 17, the Adelantado positioned himself on a hilltop “a crossbow shot” from the village and charged the two aides who had negotiated unsuccessfully with Porras to try again. The mutineers refused even to speak to the representatives. Six rebels conspired to slaughter Columbus’s brother, believing that once he was out of the way, the other loyalists would surrender.
In battle formation, they cried out “Kill! Kill!” as they attacked the Adelantado and his company. Five of the six would-be assassins fell before the loyalists.
The Adelantado responded with a fierce attack of his own, dispatching at least two men: Juan Sánchez, who had never lived down his reputation as the man who allowed the Quibián to escape, and Juan Barbara, who had initiated the scuffle with drawn sword. Others were wounded, and, most important of all, Francisco Porras was captured. The other mutineers, in Ferdinand’s words, “turned tail and ran away with all their might,” Bartholomew taking off after them, until his aides restrained his lust for vengeance, murmuring that “it was well to punish, but in moderation.”
If they slaughtered all their enemies, the many Indians who were observing the conflict might decide the moment had come to take on the loyalists. Bartholomew relented, and escorted Porras and the other prisoners to the beached ships, where Columbus received them gratefully, with prayers and “thanks to God for this great victory.” The loyalists, though victorious, did not escape unscathed. One of Columbus’s servants died, and the Adelantado was wounded in the hand, but recovered.
In the heat of battle, Pedro de Ledesma, the pilot turned rebel, tumbled unnoticed over a cliff, and hid until dark. Indians who discovered him were curious how he had survived the Europeans’ keen swords. They reopened his wounds with “little sticks,” examined a “cut on his head so deep one could see his brains,” and took note of other wounds that nearly severed his shoulder, cut his thigh to the bone, and sliced the sole of one foot from “heel to toe so it resembled a slipper.” Whenever the Indians approached, he shouted, “Beware, I can get up!” And they ran as if from a ghost.
Eventually the Spaniards rescued Ledesma, transporting him to a “palmthatched hut nearby, where the dampness and mosquitoes alone should have finished him off.” The ship’s surgeon spent eight days treating Ledesma’s wounds (“so terrible that it would defy the human imagination to devise any more horrible or grave,” as Las Casas would have it), until, against all expectations, he recovered. “I met him after all this in Seville, as fit and well as though nothing had ever happened,” said Las Casas, although, not long after, “I heard that he had been killed with a dagger.” In any event, the mutineers’ spirit had been broken.
On Monday, May 20, the dispirited band of rebels sent their own emissaries to Columbus to make amends and beg for mercy. They all confessed in writing to their insubordination and inhumanity, begged forgiveness from the Admiral, and expressed repentance. They swore loyalty anew “on a crucifix and missal,” and if they ever broke their word, no priest, no Christian of any kind, would hear their confession, and they would be considered to have renounced “the holy sacraments of the Church,” which meant that as wicked Christians they would be denied burial on consecrated ground, and instead be disposed of “in no man’s land as one does with heretics.”
Columbus read their pleas and confessions with satisfaction and relief. The renegades received full pardons, with the exception of Porras, who was held prisoner “that he might not be the cause of new disturbances.”
Now the question arose of where to billet the men. With space tight on the two shipwrecks housing the loyalists, and lingering tensions between the rebels and loyalists, Columbus assigned the former mutineers to a camp onshore, to wait for the ships that would carry them to Spain. They could “wander the island as he directed, bartering their trade goods, until the arrival of the ships,” according to Las Casas. “And God knows what damage this party inflicted on the Indians and what outrages they committed.”
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ays later, the anniversary of their arrival came and went. His recent pledge of loyalty to Ovando forgotten, Columbus fumed at the delays he had been forced to endure, “asserting that the delay was deliberate, and occasioned by [Ovando’s] hope that the Admiral would die there.” But he had not died. He had survived, intent on vindication.